Reviews

Character Sketches
Solo Piano Works by American Women

Performance and CD: "Nanette Solomon's playing is expert and nuanced, recorded sound excellent." American Record Guide. "Her splendid technique is combined with a fine musical sense of rhythm and phrasing. I was also delighted with her exquisite use of color and tone. She plays with assurance and sensitivity...[This CD is] highly recommended. Pan Pipes of Sigma Alpha Iota.

Victoria Bond: "offers the easy folksy appeal of cowboy ballads and ragtimey blues." Judith Lang Zaimont: "Replete with dandy tunes, poetically rendered moods, and more than enough sumptuous pianistic color and variety to make them great favorietes with performaners and audiences alike." Lehman, American Record Guide.

Tania León: "a brief, dense synthesis of American, Latin and international styles. After one echoing note produced by holding a string inside the instrument, the work combines what sounds like serial tone rows with touches of Latin dance rhythms, stride piano and blues in a thick, moody jumble. It is quick, intense and highly personal." New York Newsday.

Jane Brockman: "[It] weaves themes of Wagner, Schoenberg and Mussorgsky into a Debussyian texture, making the four composers the 'characters' sketched in the work ... Brockman unifies the mottoes with her own similar motives. The second sketch's whirling upper-register trills and four-note cells are especially effective, and Solomon plays them with commendable color and clarity." Ruth Schonthal: "It is a charming suite, whose moods and rhythms find sympathy in Solomon's colorful playing." IAWM Journal (International Alliance of Women in Music).

Gwyneth Walker: "Open-hearted, with clear harmonic identity, cleverly laid out for the instrument and as gratifying for the ears as for the fingers. There's more than a hint of Samuel Barber here, which is no bad thing." Marga Richter: "Aphoristic explorations of motivic material." (Fragments) Fanfare. "An effective mood piece expressing both resignation and anger." (Exequy) Pan Pipes.